Slow Playthrough Quarterly
Games played to the end
Terms
Essays are criticism
Hour counts are not verdicts
Slow Playthrough Quarterly
Games played to the end
Reading this journal means accepting the terms below. They cover what our essays are, how the writing may be reused, and where our responsibility ends.
Everything published here is criticism: the considered opinion of a particular writer who played a particular version of a game to completion and then thought about it for several months. Essays are not consumer guidance, purchasing advice, or statements of fact about a game's quality, and reasonable readers will disagree with many of them. That is what the form is for.
Games change after release. An essay describes the game as its writer encountered it, and where a later patch materially alters something an essay depends on, we say so rather than revising the piece silently.
The hours stated in each essay are drawn from that writer's handwritten log, as described on the practice page. They are approximate by nature, they describe how one person spent their time, and they are not a measure of a game's length, value or difficulty. They must not be quoted as though they were.
This journal does not score, rank or rate anything. Any figure, star rating or grade attributed to us anywhere is fabricated. Where a publisher or storefront presents a number as coming from this journal, it did not.
Brief quotation with attribution is welcome, in print or online. Reproducing full essays, translating them without permission, or using this journal's text as training material for commercial machine learning systems is not permitted.
Our writing and our hour counts may not be used in advertising, on storefront pages, in press material or in any promotional context. A sentence from an eight-thousand-word essay, detached from the argument that produced it, misrepresents both the essay and the game.
All photographs, illustrations and the emblem used here were produced for this journal and remain ours. They are not screenshots and should not be presented as depictions of any game. Names of games, studios and publishers belong to their respective owners and are used for identification and critical commentary only; no affiliation or endorsement is claimed or implied.
This journal is not a business. There is no shop, no paid issue, no membership, no donation route and no advertising, so nothing can be ordered, paid for, refunded or delivered in connection with it. Any correspondence claiming to trade under our name has nothing to do with us.
This site is provided as it stands. We do not undertake that it will always be reachable, that every issue will remain online indefinitely, or that internal links will survive a future reorganisation. Essays may be corrected, annotated or, rarely, withdrawn at editorial discretion.
So far as applicable law permits, we accept no liability for loss or damage arising from reliance on anything published here, including purchases made or avoided on the strength of an essay. Criticism is an input to your judgement, not a substitute for it.
An essay occasionally points to something published elsewhere. Whoever runs that site answers for it, not us: we cannot promise it is accurate or that it will still exist next year, and their terms take over the moment you arrive.
This page is rewritten from time to time as the journal changes. The text in front of you is always the version that applies, and if you carry on reading after a revision you are reading under the revised wording rather than a remembered one.
Readers in many places hold statutory rights that no set of terms can remove. Those rights are untouched by everything above, and the clauses here apply only so far as the law where you live allows them to.